Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why

Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 24, 2008 —

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country &

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

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Commentary

Mr. Malone, an honest journalist, (gee, that's almost a contradiction in terms) has correctly assessed the situation. Maybe he and Bernard Goldberg could get together and actually create an honest and informative publication of some sort.

Let the word go forth to the executive suites of media organizations across the land - keep on with this infernal bilge that you allow your lackeys to spew forth on a constant basis and you will witness an even further erosion of your circulation and / or viewership. Smaller numbers of readers/ viewers means you can't charge advertisers as much i..e decreased revenues. Decreased revenues mean smaller paychecks or maybe even NO paychecks.

This message should also be heeded by the executives of the firms that advertise in the various media. The American public can always decide that they are not going to support your firms and buy other products. Lower sales = lower profits = smaller paychecks

.In summary, message to all members of "management" whether you are CEO, CFO, VP of News, Managing Editor, Assignment Editor, etc. - if you keep on the current path you will be stabbing yourselves in your wallets.

Liquidating the Empire

By Patrick J. Buchanan

October 14, 2008

"Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers."

So Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised Herbert Hoover in theGreat Crash of '29.

Hoover did. And the nation liquidated him -- and the Republicans.]

In the Crash of 2008, 40 percent of stock value has vanished,almost $9 trillion. Some $5 trillion in real estate value has disappeared. A recession looms with sweeping layoffs, unemployment compensation surging, and social welfare benefits soaring.

America's first trillion-dollar deficit is at hand.

In Fiscal Year 2008 the deficit was $438 billion.

With tax revenue sinking, we will add to this year's deficit the$200 to $300 billion needed to wipe the rotten paper off the books of Fannie and Freddie, the $700 billion (plus the $100 billion inadd-ons and pork) for the Wall Street bailout, the $85 billion to bail out AIG, and $37 billion more now needed, the $25 billion for GM, Chrysler and Ford, and the hundreds of billions Hank Paulson will need to buy corporate paper and bail out banks to stop the panic.

As Americans save nothing, where are the feds going to get the money? Is the Fed going to print it and destroy the dollar and credit rating of the United States? Because the nations whose vaults are full of dollars and U.S. debt -- China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arabs -- are reluctant to lend us more. Sovereign wealth funds that plunged billions into U.S. banks have already been burned.

Uncle Sam's VISA card is about to be stamped "Canceled.

"The budget is going to have to go under the knife. But what gets cut?

Social Security and Medicare are surely exempt. Seniors have already taken a huge hit in their 401(k)s. And as the Democrats are crafting another $150 billion stimulus package for the working poor and middle class, Medicaid and food stamps are untouchable. Interest on the debt cannot be cut. It is going up. Will a Democratic Congress slash unemployment benefits, welfare,education, student loans, veterans benefits -- in a recession?

No way. Yet, that is almost the entire U.S. budget -- except for defense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and foreign aid. And this is where the axe will eventually fall.

It is the American Empire that is going to be liquidated.

Retrenchment has begun with Bush's backing away from confrontations with Axis-of-Evil charter members Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs, and will likely continue with a negotiated peace in Afghanistan. Gen. Petraeus and Secretary Gates are already talking "reconciliation" with the Taliban.

We no longer live in Eisenhower or Reagan's America. Even the post-Cold War world of George H. W. Bush, where America was a global hegemon, is history. In both relative and real terms, the U.S.A. is a diminished power.

Where Ike spent 9 percent of GDP on defense, Reagan 6 percent, we spend 4 percent. Yet we have two wars bleeding us and many more nations to defend, with commitments in the Baltic, Eastern Europe,and the Balkans we did not have in the Cold War. As U.S. weapons systems are many times more expensive today, we have fewer strategic aircraft and Navy ships than Ike or Reagan commanded. Our active-duty Army and Marine Corps consist of 700,000 troops, 15 percent women, and a far higher percentage of them support rather than combat troops.

With so few legions, we cannot police the world, and we cannot afford more. Yet, we have a host of newly hostile nations we did not have in 1989.

U.S. interests in Latin America are being challenged not only by Cuba, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Honduras. Brazil, Argentina and Chile go their own way. Russia is reasserting hegemony in the Caucasus, testing new ICBMs, running bomber probes up to U.S. air space. China, growing at 10 percent as we head into recession, is bristling over U.S. military sales to Taiwan. Iran remains defiant. Pakistan is rife with anti-Americanism and al-Qaida sentiment.

The American Empire has become a vast extravagance.

With U.S. markets crashing and wealth vanishing, what are we doing with 750 bases and troops in over 100 countries?

With a recession of unknown depth and duration looming, why keep borrowing billions from rich Arabs to defend rich Europeans, or billions from China and Japan to hand out in Millennium Challenge Grants to Tanzania and Burkina Faso?

America needs a bottom-up review of all strategic commitments dating to a Cold War now over for 20 years.

Is it essential to keep 30,000 troops in a South Korea with twice the population and 40 times the wealth of the North? Why are McCain and Obama offering NATO memberships, i.e., war guarantees against Russia, to a Georgia run by a hothead like Mikheil Saakashvili, and a Ukraine, millions of whose people prefer their kinship to Russia to an alliance with us?

We must put "country first," says John McCain.

Right you are, Senator. Time to look out for America first.

The Crash of 2008 - The party's over

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Crash of 2008, which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people’s wealth, is, like the Crash of 1929, likely to mark the end of one era and the onset of another.

The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America. The “Omnipower” and “Indispensable Nation” we heard about in all the hubris and braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history.

Seizing on the crisis, the left says we are witnessing the failure of market economics, a failure of conservatism.

This is nonsense. What we are witnessing is the collapse of Gordon Gecko (”Greed Is Good!”) capitalism. What we are witnessing is what happens to a prodigal nation that ignores history, and forgets and abandons the philosophy and principles that made it great.

A true conservative cherishes prudence and believes in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and a self-reliant republic. He believes in saving for retirement and a rainy day, in deferred gratification, in not buying on credit what you cannot afford, in living within your means.

Is that really what got Wall Street and us into this mess — that we followed too religiously the gospel of Robert Taft and Russell Kirk?

“Government must save us!” cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government — the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy?

For years, we Americans have spent more than we earned. We save nothing. Credit card debt, consumer debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt — all are at record levels. And with pensions and savings being wiped out, much of that debt will never be repaid.

Our standard of living is inevitably going to fall. For foreigners will not forever buy our bonds or lend us more money if they rightly fear that they will be paid back, if at all, in cheaper dollars.

We are going to have to learn to live again without our means.

The party’s over

Up through World War II, we followed the Hamiltonian idea that America must remain economically independent of the world in order to remain politically independent.

But this generation decided that was yesterday’s bromide and we must march bravely forward into a Global Economy, where we all depend on one another. American companies morphed into “global companies” and moved plants and factories to Mexico, Asia, China and India, and we began buying more cheaply from abroad what we used to make at home: shoes, clothes, bikes, cars, radios, TVs, planes, computers.

As the trade deficits began inexorably to rise to 6 percent of GDP, we began vast borrowing from abroad to continue buying from abroad.

At home, propelled by tax cuts, war in Iraq and an explosion in social spending, surpluses vanished and deficits reappeared and began to rise. The dollar began to sink, and gold began to soar.
Yet, still, the promises of the politicians come. Barack Obama will give us national health insurance and tax cuts for all but that 2 percent of the nation that already carries 50 percent of the federal income tax load.

John McCain is going to cut taxes, expand the military, move NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, confront Russia and force Iran to stop enriching uranium or “bomb, bomb, bomb,” with Joe Lieberman as wartime consigliere.

Who are we kidding?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end.

The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget. Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars.

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a Katrina-like failure of government, of our political class, and of democracy itself, casting a cloud over the viability and longevity of the system.

Notice who is managing the crisis. Not our elected leaders. Nancy Pelosi says she had nothing to do with it. Congress is paralyzed and heading home. President Bush is nowhere to be seen.
Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves.

An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. We are just spectators.

What the Greatest Generation handed down to us — the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved — the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away.

McCain Dumps Both Hagee and Parsley

By RICK KLEIN with JOHN SANTUCCI

May 23, 2008

This is one way to avoid those new baggage surcharges.
Sen. John McCain's rough run continues -- the unending stream of lobbyists now joined by a new pastor and an old pastor in being shown the door. (One day, two rejected endorsements -- there's a sign of cardiovascular strength.)
Whose health should give us more concern -- McCain's, or the McCain campaign's?
Much more on the former Friday -- with the release of his long-delayed medical records. (Three hours for 400 pages -- read fast -- and the AP got a preview to set the day's agenda.)
As for the campaign -- Team McCain unloads the laundry in a week where the main story has still been the Democrats. But all that time to rest and rejuvenate while the Democrats spar has resulted in what, exactly?
McCain, R-Ariz., may be a young and vibrant 71, but his campaign (in the midst of its roughest week since wrapping up the nomination) suddenly seems tired before its time.
"Republicans are increasingly concerned that he could wind up badly outgunned, saddled with serious deficiencies in money, organization and partisan intensity against the likely Democratic nominee, Sen. Barack Obama," Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen report for Politico.
"After making a promising debut as their nominee, McCain has worried many Republicans by seeming to flounder during the past few weeks," they write. "Some see the McCain campaign as a pale imitation of the well-financed Bush campaigns, both models of precision and ruthless efficiency."
The AP's Philip Elliott: "Republican John McCain has been slow to take advantage of his potential head start for the presidency against Democrats, who are better organized and generate more excitement among voters."
It was the Nazi comments that put McCain over the edge with the Rev. John Hagee, after months of controversy over the endorsement: "crazy and unacceptable," he called Hagee's words, in rejecting his endorsement perhaps minutes before Hagee withdrew it.
"A source close to McCain told ABC News the Arizona senator thinks these sentiments [about Hitler doing God's will] are crazy, and that back in February when the campaign accepted Hagee's endorsement, no one on the campaign, and certainly not McCain, had any idea that Hagee believed these types of things," ABC's Jake Tapper reports.
The Rev. Rod Parsley joined Hagee overboard -- and it only took hours, not months, for McCain to toss him there.
"I believe there is no place for that kind of dialogue in America, and I believe that even though he endorsed me, and I didn't endorse him, the fact is that I repudiate such talk, and I reject his endorsement," McCain said in a statement Thursday, per ABC's Bret Hovell.
Just hours earlier, ABC's Brian Ross reported on "Good Morning America" that Parsley had called Islam "the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil," and said Islam is an "anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world."
It all serves to obscure McCain's message: "At the start of his Northern California fundraising and campaign trip, the dominant news of the day was not on McCain's official agenda," per the San Francisco Chronicle's Carla Marinucci and John Wildermuth.
"McCain's visit underscored how the senator's presidential campaign has been challenged on multiple fronts by potentially damaging news. Those stories included the planned and limited release of his health records to a handful of media outlets today -- raising questions about his medical history -- along with a new focus on his ties to lobbyists."
What makes the Hagee/Parsley issues particularly troublesome for McCain is the damage it does to the his brand; how easy is it to point out that this would not have happened to McCain 2000?
"Mr. McCain has been courting Christian conservatives after attacking them eight years ago as 'agents of intolerance,' " Neela Banerjee and Michael Luo write in The New York Times. "The latest Hagee remarks to surface may strike at the heart of Mr. McCain's efforts to reach a critical group of voters, Jews, some of whom have viewed Mr. Obama with suspicion."
"In the end, it was just too much," David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network writes. (And what took so long?)
It could have a lasting impact: "John McCain's rejection of John Hagee's endorsement today is the starkest example yet of McCain's ham handed approach to dealing with the Christian Right and with handling religious matters generally," Beliefnet's Dan Gilgoff writes. "It's a striking contrast to era of George W. Bush."
Gilgoff continues: "Having been newly chastened by the Hagee ordeal, McCain may be loath to reach out to other Religious Right figures. Come November, that cold shoulder could have McCain in more political hot water than controversial endorsements from evangelical leaders."

McCain, Parsley and Hagee

McCain Pastor: Islam Is a 'Conspiracy of Spiritual Evil'

By BRIAN ROSS, AVNI PATEL and REHAB EL-BURI

May 22, 2008—

Despite his call for the U.S. to win the "hearts and minds of the Islamic world," Sen. John McCain recruited the support of an evangelical minister who describes Islam as "anti-Christ" and Mohammed as "the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil."
McCain sought the support of Pastor Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio at a critical time in his campaign in February, when former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was continuing to draw substantial support from the Christian right.
At a campaign appearance in Cincinnati, McCain introduced Parsley as "one of the truly great leaders in America, a moral compass, a spiritual guide."
Campaign aides positioned Parsley right behind McCain for photographers, apparently unconcerned about Parsley's well-established denunciations of the Islamic faith in a book "Silent No More" and on DVDs of sermons about Islam.
"Islam is an anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world," Parsley says on the DVDs reviewed by ABC News.
"America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed," Parsley says, "and I believe Sept. 11, 2001 was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore."
Parsley's views and his connection to the McCain campaign are now beginning to show up on Arab Web sites and newspapers.
Al Moheet, a regional Arabic Web site operating in Egypt, carries the story with a picture of McCain and the headline: "McCain's Spiritual Adviser Calls for the Destruction of Islam."
"If there is a McCain presidency, he will start with a serious handicap in the Arab world," said former CIA intelligence officer John Kiriakou. "And the handicap is that it is already assumed in Muslim countries that they will not get a fair shake from a McCain administration," said Kiriakou.
In a statement to ABC News about Parsley's comments, McCain's campaign said the senator "obviously strongly rejects such statements." The campaign did not answer the question of whether it was aware of Parsley's widely publicized statements prior to seeking his endorsement in February.
McCain has not disassociated himself from the pastor, but the campaign statement said, "Just because someone endorses John McCain doesn't mean he endorses all of their views."
McCain has repeatedly urged the U.S. to show respect for Islam. "Our goal must be to win the 'hearts and minds' of the vast majority of moderate Muslims who do not want their future controlled by a minority of violent extremists," McCain told the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles on March 26.
But well before he was asked to endorse McCain, Pastor Parsley took a much different view about moderate Muslims in his book and sermons. "I would counter respectfully that what some people call extremists are instead mainstream Muslim believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam," he said.
McCain said in his March speech, "We must remember that our freedoms are not only defended by our diplomacy and military power but, very importantly, by the decency and respect with which we treat one another."
Parsley says he can be silent no more about Islam. "I will rail against the idea that the God of Christianity and the God of Islam are the same being. I will sound the alarm about the pernicious agenda of the enemies of my country and the cross of my Christ, and I will proclaim the truth at every opportunity."
Parsley, through a spokesperson at his church, declined to be interviewed by ABC News.
In a statement, a spokesperson, Gene Pierce, said Parsley's comments "were in response to militant Islamic leaders' repeated pledges to kill Americans and destroy the United States and Western culture and democracies."
His Web site, said the spokesperson, "also makes a distinction between Muslim terrorists and the vast majority of peaceful Muslims."
Parsley says he has served in the public ministry for more than 30 years and now has a congregation of more than 12,000 people.
He hosts the television show "Breakthrough" on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, aired on 1,400 television and cable channels around the world.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

McCain's Jeremiah Wright?

By FRANK RICH

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and

endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including

twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.
Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”
Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a

pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001,

televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.
None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an

endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as

we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of

a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to

criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.

This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s

dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.
Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.

For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining) demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census Bureau

announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.
Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

Frank Rich is a columnist for The New York Times

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Rich

Why You Need To Meet The Real John McCain

A message from
Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt,
Sr. Policy Advisor,
U.S. Dept. of Education
during the Reagan Administration


As a delegate to our state convention this coming weekend we have a solemn obligation to know the truth about the man who has been anointed the “presumptive nominee” of our party. Our job is not to be a rubber stamp for anyone else’s agenda, no matter how “nobly” the cause is presented. The Republican establishment in Maine is counting on us not having the documented information on this sheet. It is counting on our willingness to be told what to think in the same way that the mainstream media has been telling us what to think throughout this entire election cycle. We are expected to suspend any other concerns we may have in the name of “party unity.”



The truth is that a patriot who loves his country makes it an ultimate priority to be well-educated about the decisions he or she must make. Unless we have come to understand how dominated by the leftist military-industrial complex America’s major media has become, and done some research, we are not prepared to do our duty at the convention.



This letter, supported by many delegates to the Republican Convention, is literally about saving the party and the nation from a maniacal neoconservative war monger, who supports a United States presence in Iraq for 100 years, and who is not really even a Republican!



“War hero” image is a media creation not supported by the facts



McCain graduated 894th of the 899 cadets in his class at the Naval Academy. Google it. Why would we want someone who was a failure and took his responsibilities so flippantly as our commander-in-chief?



McCain was an irresponsible pilot who crashed 6 planes, and started a major fire on an aircraft carrier through negligent action. Why would we want someone this reckless in the most-important office on the planet?



McCain collaborated with the enemy, was given “soft” treatment because his father was an admiral, and is known as “Songbird McCain” by those who were imprisoned with him. (http://vietnamveteransagainstmccain.com) He is the MIA/POW family’s worst enemy for his constant attempts to belittle their concerns and stifle their inquiries while serving in the Senate.



McCain ditched his ill wife to marry an heiress when he returned from Vietnam



Is this the type of morality we Republicans condone? Is this type of heinous lack of loyalty we want in a President? He also has a track record of shocking verbal abuse, including screaming profanities against his Senate Republican colleagues. Senator Thad Cochran, MS, says “The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine.” Other Senators relate times when McCain screamed four-letter obscenities right in their faces in the Senate cloak room, like Dick Shelby, Rick Santorum or Jim Imhofe. “The man is unhinged,” one senator said. “He is frighteningly unfit to be commander-in-chief.”



The truth is, John McCain is not even a Republican. He is a phony stalking horse who is a liberal in disguise. He not only can’t win this fall because he is so out of step with the majority of Americans and with the principled stands of Republicanism, but if we support this person for our nominee, he will likely destroy our party. Consider:



He was intimately involved in the “Keating 5” Savings & Loan scandal.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Keating ]

He has been endorsed by the liberal/leftist New York Times.

He is a big advocate of the extreme “green” global warming scare, and the economically horrific “solutions” being proposed by people like Al Gore.



He has promoted illegal amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.



His McCain-Feingold Bill has destroyed much of the rights of people to take part in the political process the way they see fit. This bill remains un-Constitutional and a major affront to the First Amendment protections on the right of free speech.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act ]


He is a big-time gun grabber who is an extreme advocate of restrictions on 2nd Amendment rights.



He opposes repeal of Roe v. Wade, and opposes a Constitutional amendment to protect all life.



He is no fiscal conservative, and he supports raising taxes on Social Security benefits.



He continues his aggressive support for the Iraq War, which costs the U.S. taxpayer $12 billion a month, even though only 34% of Americans support the war. (According to Paul Craig Roberts, Asst. Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, and vocal opponent of the Iraq War: 4,538 Americans have died in the war, 29,780 have been wounded, 300,000 soldiers are suffering from major depression, and 320,000 received brain injuries, all as a result of this unconstitutional and immoral war.)



We will hear much about “unity” at the Maine State Convention. However, it is very important that we understand that to unify behind this man is tantamount to nominating a Democrat. We can vote our consciences or abstain from voting.



John McCain did poorly in our Maine caucuses. By most estimates he got fewer than 20% of the delegates to the State Convention coming out of our caucuses and was soundly trounced by both Romney and Texas Congressman Ron Paul. McCain did not win a single county in the straw poll, with 15 counties going to Romney and one (Aroostook) going to Dr. Paul. McCain has little support nationally…there are never huge rallies for McCain, unless people are paid to show up. In short, he is a media creation and the darling of the Trotskyite neoconservative warmongers who have hijacked our party. He does not support our own platform!



Former Romney supporters who receive this info sheet DO NOT have to follow the “uncalled for” advice of the Massachusetts governor that you go over the cliff with support for this unstable man.



DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF OR YOUR VOTE TO BE PROSTITUTED IN THE NAME OF PARTY UNITY. PUT YOUR COUNTRY FIRST!



Thank you for taking the time to read this letter and for being such an important part of our representative form of government -- the envy of the world!

Will the Right Sit It Out?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

April 29, 2008

If John McCain wins the presidency, his comeback -- after the bankrupt debacle his campaign had become in the summer of 2007 with his backing of the amnesty bill -- will be the stuff of legend.

And as nominee, he is entitled to conduct his own campaign and be cut slack by a party whose brand name is now Enron.

That said, McCain seems to have decided to win by love-bombing the Big Media and putting miles between himself and the base.

Consider his "Forgotten Places" tour of last week.

It began in Selma, Ala., where McCain went to Edmund Pettis Bridge to hail John Lewis and the marchers night-sticked and hosed down by the Alabama State Troopers on the Montgomery march for voting rights.

Now that was a seminal movement in the fight for civil rights.

But this is not 1965. Today, John Lewis is a big dog in the "No-Whites-Need-Apply!" Black Caucus. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is sermonizing White America. The Rev. Al Sharpton is trying to shut down the Big Apple. And the fight for equal rights is being led by Ward Connerly.

With no help from McCain, Connerly is trying to put on five state ballots a Civil Rights Initiative that declares white men are also equal and not to be denied their civil rights because of the color of their skin.

And where does McCain stand?

From Selma, McCain went to the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective, where black ladies make the famous blankets. The stop could not but call to mind the hundreds of thousands of textile and apparel jobs in the Carolinas and Georgia lost after NAFTA and Most-Favored Nation for China, both of which McCain enthusiastically supported.

McCain's next stop was Inez, Ky., where LBJ declared war on poverty. But LBJ's war was a politically motivated scheme to shift wealth and power to government, which led to a pathological dependency among America's poor, his own abdication and Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign against Big Government that ushered in the Conservative Decade.

McCain then went to New Orleans to backhand Bush for failing to act swiftly to rescue the victims of Katrina.

But the real failure of New Orleans was of the corrupt and incompetent regime of Mayor Ray Nagin and the men of New Orleans, who left 30,000 women and children stranded in a sea of stagnant water.

No doubt Bush hit the snooze button, but why the piling on?

Then McCain headed up to Youngstown, Ohio, to tell the folks their jobs are never coming back and NAFTA was a sweet deal.

But why, when America's mini-mills and steel mills are among the most efficient on earth -- in terms of man hours needed to produce a ton of steel -- aren't those jobs coming back?

Answer: It is due to the free-trade policies of Bush and McCain, which permit trade rivals to impose value-added taxes of 15 percent to 20 percent on steel imports from the United States while rebating those taxes on steel exports to the United States. We are getting it in the neck coming and going.

An America First trade and tax policy could have U.S. steel mills rising again, while those in Japan, China, Russia and Brazil would be shutting down as uncompetitive in the U.S. market.

But we no longer put America first.

The U.S. government burns its incense at the altar of the Global Economy. The losers are those guys in Youngstown McCain was lecturing on the beauty of NAFTA. And the winners are the CEOs who pull down seven-, eight- and even nine-figure annual packages selling out their country for the corporation.

Does McCain think $6 trillion in trade deficits since NAFTA, a dollar rotting away and 3.5 million manufacturing jobs lost under Bush was all inevitable? Does he think we can do nothing to stop the deindustrialization of a country that used to produce 96 percent of all it consumed?

Why should those guys in Youngstown vote for McCain?

So the feds can teach them how to shovel snow?

Even Hillary, whose husband did NAFTA with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole's help, now gets it.

Then McCain took a time out to denounce the North Carolina GOP for ads tying the Rev. Wright to Obama, and the pair to two Democratic congressional candidates. To their credit, the North Carolinians told McCain where to get off and are running the ads.

What does a McCain victory mean for conservatives?

Probably a veto on tax hikes and perhaps a fifth justice like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito or John Roberts, to turn two pair into a full house. Fifty years after Warren, it could be game, set, match for the right.

But McCain may also mean more Middle East wars, more bellicosity, more manufacturing jobs lost, malingering in the culture wars, and more illegal aliens and amnesty.

In Pennsylvania, thousands of Republicans re-registered to vote Democratic, and 27 percent of the GOP votes went to Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. McCain may just stretch this rubber band so far it snaps back in his face.

General, Ambassador Wave White Flag After Ron Paul's Grilling

Both the electronic and print media made certain that the world knew that Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain had questioned Gen. David Petraeus before the Armed Services Committee but totally ignored the blistering by Rep. Ron Paul before the House Committee on Foreign Affair

“Reviewing the presentations by our panel, I have noted with some concern that they seem more focused on justifying a future attack on Iran than reporting on progress in Iraq,” Paul said.

Paul expressed concern about claims that “new enemies” were emerging in Iraq with ties to Iran: “First we were told that the enemy was Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party. Then we were told the enemy was the ‘bitter-enders’ from Saddam’s former government. Then the prime enemy became al Qaeda in Iraq, a prime focus of the presentation by Amb. Crocker and Gen. Petraeus last September.

Now the two were saying that the new enemies are mysterious ‘Special Groups’ that are said to have spun off from Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

“If this phenomenon of constantly emerging enemies bent on destabilizing Iraq is accurate and our presence in Iraq keeps generating new enemies,” he said, “perhaps the problem is the occupation itself. If this is the case, doesn’t it make sense that our departure from Iraq may actually have a stabilizing effect?”

Paul said he suspects that these Iranian-supported “Special Groups” are not the prime enemy. He suggested they are being used to provide an excuse for a U.S. attack on Iran or are meant as justification for a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq.

“It makes little sense to assert that Iran is funding militias to undermine the Iraqi government.

“The leading political parties of Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, have close ties to Iran. Leaders of these parties were in exile in Iran until the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Iranian President [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is warmly welcomed in Baghdad by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. Why would Iran set up militias in the south to destabilize a government with such strong Iranian ties? I find the allegation that Iran just cannot tolerate an elected government next door to be unsatisfying.”

Paul then challenged them to produce “any hard proof ” that the Iranian government is arming groups in Iraq.

Paul: “Why should the American people continue to support a war that was justified by false information, since Saddam Hussein never aggressed against the United States, Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, and Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction?

“It is said that we must continue the war because we have already sacrificed so much. But what is moral about demanding even more needless sacrifice of human lives merely to save face for the mistakes of invading and occupying Iraq? Doesn’t it seem awfully strange that the Iraqi government we support is an ally of the Iranians who are our declared enemies? Are we not now supporting the Iranians by propping up their allies in Iraq? If (Iraqi Prime Minister) Maliki is our ally and he has ‘diplomatic relations’ with (Iranian President) Ahmadinejad, why can’t we? Why must we continue to provoke Iran, just looking for an excuse to bomb that country? Does our policy in Iraq not guarantee chaos for years to come?

“It is estimated that up to 2,000 Iraqi soldiers refused to fight against al-Sadr’s militia. Why should we not expect many of the 80,000 Sunnis wehave recently armed to someday turn their weapons against us, since they as well as the Mahdi Army detest any and all foreign occupation?

“Is it not true that with the recent surge in violence in March, attacks are now back at the same levels as they were in 2005? Does Iran not have a greater justification to be involved in neighboring Iraq than we do, since it is 6,000 miles from our shores? If China and Russia were occupying Mexico, how would we react? Since no one can define ‘winning the war,’ just who do we expect to surrender? Does this not mean that this war will be endless since the political leaders will not end it—until we go broke?

”Paul said, “I do have one question that there is enough time to answer: In your estimation, does the administration have the authority to bomb Iran without further congressional approval?”

Petraeus: “Uh, congressman, I, uh, I’m the commander for Iraq, and I do not know the answer to that question, and it’s not within my purview.

”Crocker: Er, uhh, congressman, nor is it in mine, er, ahh, uh, I, uhh you know, my job is Iraq, and I’m just not competent to pronounce on, uh, an issue like that.

”Paul: (who must have been wondering if either had ever read the Constitution) “It disturbs me to no end that we cannot get a flat-out “no” on this question.”

Why McCain Would be Worse Than Bush

by Patrick J Buchanan
January 25, 2008

In 2004, the voters of Arizona, by 56 percent to 44 percent, enacted Proposition 200, requiring proof of citizenship before an individual may vote or receive state benefits. Forty-six percent of Hispanics voted for Prop. 200, giving the lie to those who say Hispanics support the illegal invasion of their country.

Over 190,000 Arizonans petitioned to put Prop. 200 on the ballot. As it simply required proof of citizenship before receiving the benefits and privileges of citizenship, who could oppose it? Answer: the entire GOP congressional delegation, led by Sen. John McCain.

This is the same John McCain who battled the border fence and colluded with Teddy Kennedy on the amnesty bill rejected by Congress last year after a national uproar.

Bottom line: If the presidential race is between Hillary and Amnesty John, the border security battle is over and lost. As Laura Ingraham asks, “If Congress passes McCain-Kennedy in 2009, would President McCain sign it?”

For conservatives, the stakes could not be higher.

For on the great controversies, McCain has sided as often with the Democrats and the Big Media that pay him court as with conservatives.

Where President Bush has been bravest, on taxes and judges, McCain has been his nemesis. Not only did McCain vote against the Bush tax cuts twice, he colluded to sell out the most conservative of the Bush nominees to the courts.

In 1993, McCain voted to confirm ACLU liberal and pro-abortion Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But when Bush set out to restore constitutionalism, McCain colluded with Democrats who wanted to retain power to kill Bush’s most conservative nominees.

McCain helped form the Gang of 14, including seven Democrats, who agreed to block a GOP Senate from using the “nuclear option” – allowing a simple GOP majority to break a Democrat filibuster of judicial nominees – unless the seven Democrats approved. McCain thus conspired with liberals to put at risk the most courageous conservatives nominees of President Bush.

With his record of voting for liberal justices Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, and of colluding with Democrats in their campaign to kill the most conservative Bush nominees, what guarantee is there a President McCain will nominate and fight for the fifth jurist who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?

In the battle over campaign finance reform, McCain colluded again. The McCain-Feingold law denies to gun folks and right-to-lifers their basic First Amendment right to name friends and foes in ads run before elections.

As for the policies that have transparently failed Bush and the nation, McCain remains an obdurate advocate.

After America has run five straight record trade deficits that have denuded the nation of thousands of factories and 3 million manufacturing jobs, McCain is still babbling on about Smoot-Hawley.

“When you study history, every time we’ve adopted protectionism, we’ve paid a very heavy price,” McCain told a Detroit paper after informing Michiganders their auto jobs are never coming back.

But what history is John McCain talking about?

Was the Tariff of 1816, which saved infant U.S. industries from the malicious dumping by British merchants after the War of 1812, a failure? Were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Calhoun and Henry Clay fools to support President Madison’s tariff?

From Abraham Lincoln through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party – the Party of Protection – put 12 presidents in the White House to two for the Democrats, and the United States became the mightiest industrial power in history, producing 42 percent of the world’s manufactured goods.
This is failure – while Bush free trade is a success? Tell it to Ohio.

Even Hillary Clinton, whose husband enacted NAFTA with McCain’s support, has begun to question the NAFTA paradigm. Not McCain.

Where Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon came to office determined to extricate the nation with honor from a war whose costs had begun to outweigh any benefit, McCain is talking about spending 50 or 100 years in Iraq.

Where Bush, by moving NATO onto Russia’s doorstep, planting bases in Central Asia and intervening in the affairs of Russia’s neighbors, has undone the work of Reagan in making Russia a friend, he sounds like George McGovern alongside the braying McCain, who can’t wait to get into Vladimir Putin’s face.

Where Bush finally cleansed his administration of neocons, if not of their legacy, a McCain candidacy is the last, best hope of a neocon restoration and new military adventures in the Middle East.

If Rudy Giuliani founders in Florida, neocons will be chanting, “Mac is back!”

The three issues that ruined the Bush presidency are this misbegotten war in Iraq, the failure to secure America’s borders from invasion and a mindless trade policy that has destroyed the dollar and left foreigners with $5 trillion to buy up America at fire-sale prices.

McCain remains an unthinking advocate of all three.

But where Bush was at his best, on taxes and judges, McCain was collaborating with Hillary. The question conservatives may face if McCain is nominated is not whom should I vote for, but should I vote.

John McCain- Traitor?? - Interview with Colonel Earl Hopper, USAF (Ret.)

Earl Hopper: I'm a US Army retired colonel. I spent 30 year in the Army. I was Airborne Special Forces, I fought in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. My oldest son was also on active duty, He was in the Air Force and shot down over North Vietnam. He remains missing in action. Although the government has declared him dead, we have no body; no evidence of his death.

I first became familiar with the present senator from Arizona, John McCain (and I hate to say "from Arizona" because I'm a native of Arizona. I was born and raised there, and still live there) but, from the very beginning, in talking to the returned POWs, in the very beginning we began to hear some very bad things about John McCain and his activities while he was in the POW camps.

As an example (and I'll quote this because it can be checked out), he personally wrote an article in the magazine [US News & World Report] , wherein he stated that during the time he was in prison (in fact I think it was 5 or 7 days after he was captured) he asked the [North] Vietnamese to take him to the hospital, the Vietnamese hospital. And in so doing, he promised them that he would would give the classified military information.

They did. He did.

They took him to the hospital, questioned him, and he gave highly classified information. The most important of which was he gave the "package route", which was the route to bomb North Vietnam. He told in detail the altitude they were flying, the direction, if they made a turn, and how to get (into N. Vietnam ?) He also gave them where the targets were; of their primary entry. Whether it was a railroad; whether is was a bridge; whether it was an ammunition or fuel dump; or whatever it was, he gave them the primary targets the United States was interested in.

After he gave them that information, the Vietnamese naturally moved their anti- aircraft defenses into those areas and built them up and strengthened them. They also moved the rockets, aircraft weapons, into the "package route" of where the airplanes were flying in or egressing. The result of this, according to the information that came out later on, in intelligence, was that the Vietnamese started knocking down our aircraft in greater amounts than they had before. In fact, there was an estimate that we started losing 60% more aircraft and more men than we had previously. This went on for about a month, and it got so bad, that they finally called off the bombing of North Vietnam because of the information that McCain had given to them.

Interviewer: And Earl, some people say that what McCain did was at the very least collaboration and at worst, treasonous. Would you say that you would agree with that?

No. I agree with only one part of it. He was treasonous.

McCain, for what he did while he was in captivity, was a traitor. Because he gave information to the enemy, classified, military information to the enemy, which caused the deaths of many of his fellow aviators that came in behind him.

http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnmccain.com/cin_hopper_video.htm

End of excerpts.

Open URL above for rest of Col. Hopper's interview

Is He One of Us?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Friday, April 25, 2008

As one looks at the polls, the issues and the candidates, the election of 2008 resembles what poker players call a "lay-down hand.

"Two-thirds of the nation believes the Iraq war a blunder. Sixty-nine percent disapproves of President Bush. Eighty-one percent thinks America is on the wrong course.

Inflation is at 4 percent and rising. Unemployment is 5 percent and rising. Gasoline, heating oil and food prices are soaring. The dollar has lost half its values against the euro. Homes are being foreclosed upon at Depression rates. The stock market is in a swoon. And 3.5 million manufacturing jobs have vanished under Bush.

Hillary and Obama have both raised far more than John McCain.

Democratic turnout in the primaries and caucuses is two and three times what it was for the GOP. The youth, energy and enthusiasm are on the Democratic side. Voter registration is rising dramatically, and the new registrants are almost all Democrats or independents.

Thirty Republican House members are retiring. In the Senate, the big question is whether Democrats will achieve a 60-40 margin to enable them to kill Republican filibusters.

By all odds, Republican retention of the White House should be as imperiled as it was in 1932, when the hapless Herbert Hoover faced FDR.

Yet John McCain, who presides over a disconsolate party many of whose leading lights not only do not love him, they do not like him, is even money to be the next president of the United States.

What explains this?

Answer: Barack Obama, the probable nominee of the Democratic Party -- his cool and pleasant demeanor aside, and his oratorical skills notwithstanding -- is being steadily pushed by his own mistakes, and rivals Hillary Clinton and McCain, outside the social, cultural and ideological mainstream of American politics.

Hillary's victory in Pennsylvania confirmed what Texas, Ohio and Florida hinted at. Barack has not closed the sale with Middle America. Moreover, he may never close the sale.

What is Barack's problem?

Though he has stitched together the McGovern wing of the party -- the anti-war crowd, the cause people, the professoriat -- with the Jesse Jackson wing -- 90 percent of the African-American vote -- he is being systematically pushed out of the heartland of the party, the white working and middle class. And reinforcing the impression in Middle America that Barack is "not one of us" is the core of both the Clinton and Republican strategies. And they are working.I

In Ohio and Pennsylvania, resistance to the probable nominee hardened and calcified among Catholics, ethnics, union and blue-collar voters, even as Barack outspent Hillary two and three to one.

Racism is the reason, wail the pundits. But this is not a reason, it is an excuse. Barack, after all, ran up record totals in virtually all-white Iowa and is favored to win in virtually all-white Oregon.

Moreover, all politics are tribal. There was resistance in rural Pennsylvania to voting for an African-American, but there was also wild enthusiasm for voting for an African-American in Philly, where Hillary -- spouse of "our first black president" -- was getting about the same share of the black vote as Barry Goldwater.

On balance, as Joe Biden undiplomatically blurted out, the fact that Obama is a black man is an extraordinary asset in 2008. It is the reason a junior senator, three years out of the Illinois legislature, is running first for the nomination, and has become the favorite of a national media intoxicated with the idea of a black president.

Barack's problem is social, cultural and ideological.

Increasingly, he is seen not as a man of the middle, but as radical chic, a man of the liberal and leftist elite who confides to closed-door meetings in San Francisco that folks in Pennsylvania cling to guns, Bibles and bigotries as crutches, because they cannot cope in the Global Economy and government has failed them.

He is seen as a man comfortable with friends still proud of the radical role they played planting bombs in the 1960s, a man who feels relaxed about sending his daughters on Sunday to hear the racist rants of an anti-American berserker.

And if your wife, beneficiary of a Princeton-Harvard Law education denied to 99.9 percent of the people, says she cannot recall ever being proud of America before now, folks are naturally going to be suspicious about why you dumped the American flag pin.

On the big issues of 2008 -- amnesty, the hemorrhaging of American jobs, Iraq -- McCain is on the same side as George Bush, whose approval rating is 28 percent. McCain can be defeated on those issues.

But if, with a little help from Hillary, McCain can paint Barack indelibly as a man of the trendy and radical left, he can win. America will have nowhere else to go.

Journalists disagree on whether immigration, Iraq or the economy will be the major issue in 2008. The real issue may be -- and this is what is causing heart palpitations among Democrats -- is Barack Obama one of us, or is he one of them?